This morning the largest open source search project, Apache Lucene/Solr, released a new version with a raft of new features. We’ve been advising clients to consider version 4.0 for several months now, as the alpha and beta versions have become available, and we know of several already running this version on live sites. Here’s a few highlights:

Solr Cloud – a collection of new features for scalability and high availability (either on your own servers or on the Cloud), integrating Apache Zookeeper for distributed configuration management.

More NoSQL features in case you’re planning to use Solr as a primary data store, including a transaction log

A new web administration interface (including Solr Cloud features)

New spatial search features including polygon support

General performance improvements across the board (for example, fuzzy queries are 1-200 times faster!)

The new release has been several years in the making and is a considerable improvement on the previous 3.x version – related projects such as elasticsearch will also benefit. There’s also a new book, Solr in Action, just out to coincide with this release. Exciting times ahead!

Apache Lucene, Apache Solr, Apache Kafka, Apache Hadoop and their respective logos are trademarks of the
Apache Software Foundation. Elasticsearch is a trademark of Elasticsearch BV,
registered in the U.S. and in other countries.